Recent posts by Overrunned on Kongregate

The bad thing for older players is how resources would be allocated to something that’s not really a problem. Even if it’s just a slight update, people are already complaining how the game is getting stale and how the promo cards are rarely that good.

I can’t believe something as simple as this thread can degenerate into being hijacked by the topic of energy bars though. The point of the OP was to make it so that newbs would stay. The speed of the bars was just a suggestion towards that means. Now you guys are literally talking about making things easier for the sake of making things easier with no consideration for why the feature is even being talked about it. No wonder some think I’m repeating myself. What a horrible ADD level direction this thread took. What’s worse is that you guys are just tweaking feature suggestions for the sake of tweaking. Less gold per mission to make up for lower energy cost? That’s just another variation of the whole doing the lower missions to build up the reputation bars to unlock the expensive cards. None of that really speeds up anything. That just making the game different for the sake of you guys getting distracted with the whole topic about energy bars.

I think that’s another popular myth. Flash games are not downloadable games. I’ll give you crappy frontpage art but almost every flash game I’ve played I picked because of the title, the synopsis if there is any and finally the reviews and comments. Caravaneer was an example of a game that you had to pick up before you leave. The title itself was pretty much an eye getter. In terms of introduction it even got it right. Quick, short and straight to the point. Caravaneer’s problem wasn’t the design. Especially not the introduction. The problem was the developer specifically making a game that was designed to be confusing but to use Caravaneer as an example would be like saying Civilization 1 had a poor introduction or Street Fighter 2 was lame for immediately forcing you to play without a move list.

I hope this doesn’t come off like I’m being a defensive fan. I’m not really bothered by the fact that Caravaneer is the one you used as an example. It’s just the example sounds wrong. Almost every game nowadays have a complicated interface by the standards of the past. Many of the best puzzles even rely on that ambiguity.

Tyrant isn’t one of those games where the speed at attaining the lower levels is tantamount to the speed you do the higher levels especially since you will reach a point where you can no longer manipulate the cards any more than make it so that you can win on auto.

You’re better off doing arena while you wait for your meter to recharge. Arena + rep building from the missions.

One camp wants faster energy refills because they think it keeps people away

Another camp thinks things need not be changed because they think it keeps people around or that there’s nothing wrong with it

The elephant in the room though is that everyone is trying to fit their idea of what newer different users need/want but no one wants to admit that maybe their post doesn’t sound like they are considering the newbs. The actual audience for this feature.

Siberian, if only your advice can work for veterans to reconsider the newb experience either. The sad part is that even vets who try to make an alt account starting from scratch would probably just rush through it anyway and treat that as the newb experience.

Paladin, do you have a specific survey proving that players return to Tyrant time and time again because of the meter bar? I’m not saying it’s wrong but I think it’s closer to people wanting to return to games they enjoy. The meter (especially en instead of stamina) is less likely to burn players out from the game because there’s multiplayer mode. Unless you are equating stamina and en to having the same rationale and projecting stamina and en as having the same effect but one for multiplayer and one for single player. The fact alone that one is multiplayer and the other is single player means they are different. I think people will return even if stamina refills slowly because that’s the competitive nature of multiplayer gaming. However en is still a single player aspect even if Tyrant is more of a multiplayer game with a single player mode. If your logic is correct (and I’m not saying it’s not) then it would still mean that newbs will leave, they will just leave slower. However the topic is not about who will leave sooner or who will come back for more. The topic is still about reducing the number of players that might leave. (Especially the newer ones who according to the OP were there because of the recent promotion which for those who are slow to follow means they were introduced to the game in a different way than you and I have and thus they may or may not have different expectations and opinions for continuing to play the game.)

Difficulty options are definitely the way to go. After all it’s difficult to complain about hard mode being too hard, when they could be just playing on easy or medium.

One downside of difficulty options though is that you can mess up the balancing.

Personally I prefer scaling difficulty myself but I’m not sure if the complexity is why many more flash games don’t adopt that design.

By scaling I don’t mean just encountering a place where the enemies are difficult but also having a normal mode where if you die enough times, you can opt for easy mode and then at a later date the game would notify you that you can increase the difficulty and the game may still be easy because your stats have now increased or you’ve unlocked enough achievements/upgrades to prove that you might be ready for the higher difficulty.

Regarding the action rpg classic: “legend of zelda, link to the past”, it used a dungeon system with multiple floors for their main puzzle areas. they used that level design to allow the player to fall through holes in the floor to gain access to locked areas below. This added a good depth, literally, to their level design, allowing essentially for 3d maze puzzles.

They also allowed the player to ‘wander’ around the main world map freely between dungeon encounters, which allowed the player to explore even more, and gave the player the ability to ‘discover’ new hidden places.

They also included themed areas on the world map, giving a sense of a larger world than it really was. from plains areas, to river areas, to forests, each their own themed puzzles that fit into those areas well.

Not to belittle your idea but this may not be the best design for an initial rpg especially a flash game where players may not check out the game if the puzzles are too vague/annoying/long.

Do it for future games of the same character once the character becomes a mascot but for the first game, I think even though there’s no rule that says the game won’t become popular, there’s just too many chances of messing the balance up.

By better I don’t mean just subjective preference but in terms of fitting a tons more content especially for flash.

The problem with action rpgs is that you can rarely make an inventory system that doesn’t hurt and slow down your game. It doesn’t mean things like Diablo clones can’t work but in the long run it’s a lot of unnecessary mediocre game design choices that often gets tolerated because the games themselves simply play better. Not because they were designed well.

The problem with turn based rpgs however is that for flash games often times developers just don’t realize how tedious and repetitious their systems are.

For example, Ultimate Tactics had great graphics but by adopting a slow even for that time system closer to Final Fantasy Tactics – it turned many people off due to severe mouse click requirements.

Cloning doesn’t always help though. Apokalyx is a perfect example of why you don’t try to copy a system like Sonny’s even though Sonny is popular.

Not cloning or take references from popular games also doesn’t work well. Some battle systems/inventory systems of popular games like Caravaneer or Monster’s Den would have made certain other games less tedious. This rarely hurts popularity though but it’s still poor design. There’s a reason clones often sell well enough even for modern games.

As far as level design goes. Tech trees often do well. Exp from achievements also make doing achievements better. Some games utilize repetition to increase stats instead of straight level ups. These can work well for action rpgs but make sure the player understands them. Tower defenses are also one way to alleviate the feel of grind. Example, Pokemon Tower Defense.

The rest though I think fall specifically to what type of prototypical rpg you are doing. In general though, make your rpg strategic and less grinding and farming and you may get a boost in advertising from walkthrough searches. Make your game more addictive in the sense of farming and it’s better to work on what type of rare item would get tons of hype. For example, there are many videos of Pokemon Tower Defense talking about Shiny Pokemons. Make your game turn based then be sure that the animations are quick and cancellable if possible. Hotkeys are also recommended. Pestilence Z is a perfect example where the addition of hotkeys alleviated many annoyances for the players.

Perhaps because the intro is tested. A lot.
Every beta tester, even the developer himself, will see that intro when they test their flash game.
And in that development cycle, somewhere, there’ll be that itch. “This looks wrong, I can do better”.
And something is changed.

There’s a lot of stuff on the internet encouraging them too. “The first impression counts!” and stuff like that.
So some extra polish goes there.

And with story – when you have an idea about a story, you’re usually thinking about the final event first. The climax, because that’s the most exciting part. Then the intro, with some character development. Not too much, just fleshing out the character (what does he look like). And then the journey to get there. And then, finally, somewhere during the writing of said story, the end. Because you can’t just say “and then you just won”.EXAMPLE:
“Hey man, I’ve got this great idea for a game. There’s like this guy, with a hugeass sword, and he has to fight a dragon. This dragon ate all the wood in the towns and now the people don’t have houses. So this dude is homeless because this dragon came along, and now his termite farm is going to ruins, so he won’t have a job either. So now this dude is going to fight this dragon by…”
Alright, my game ideas need to be thought up at some other time than “just before bed”, (or I really should put in more effort), but generally, the big bad, the main character, and usually bits of the world have been created as part of an idea. But never an ending. That’s just tacked on by most.

Thanks. I’ve always assumed lower budget developers never have to deal with this but your post is definitely an eye opener. You would think Flash developers would have realized by now that preceding reputation from one great game is more important than any early beta tester’s impression for flash games. Even bugs, setting aside the truly game breaking ones, can be fixed while a game has been released nowadays and it doesn’t hurt the ratings much.

There is no reason why faction wars at a high level should not be noob repelling, the single player game is where you start as a beginner and thats what is supposed to hook you, then when you like it and want more you join a faction.

The problem is that you cant keep on playing in single player as much as you like, once you reach the stage where 100 energy is less than a levelup game says

I am pretty much spelling out the reason. You are spelling out the reason.

Unless you yourself have no idea what high level faction wars are mostly about, then it’s not impossible to understand why high level faction wars can be newb repelling.

Even right now if you are a casual player that have amassed a vast cardpool, you can be kicked out of a high level faction depending on how inactive you are and how much you bring as much value as the next warbonder.

Imagine a bunch of newbs being thrown head first into that scenario. You think every one of those newbs would then decide to feel rewarded by being part of a faction war quicker?

But then let’s step back and actually talk about basic faction war. Not the high level stuff.

There is zero middle game gap to faction wars. Unlike missions where the opponents slowly get difficult.

In faction wars, there is this point where you are just playing a basic faction level in which you can even be competitive even if you haven’t finished all the missions yet and activity is what gets you there and where even if your en refills, you still have to tolerate your stamina recharging.

Then there’s the sudden jump to high faction wars in which the competitive middling factions are trying to one up each other through merges or member upgrading that you have to be consistently present in the game and that even skipping a day can get you booted out depending on how your faction leader is desperate in rising up.

Then of course there’s the near unreachable faction wars where there are several warbonders.

It’s too different from the single player experience. Speeding up the single player experience will not change your opinion of the multiplayer experience in the same way it hasn’t for any other game. Add this gripping requirement of needing to be active and needing to compete with pay to win players and what you have is a situation where most newbs that will stick around with the game will already stick around even if there is little refills. Equally if they can’t tolerate energy bars taking a while to refill, they can pay and that would make them more useful for the faction wars because this being mostly a pay to compete game means they are already used to shelling out cash for the game to bypass the waiting period.

Yeah. The problem is that prototypes is misleading. It’s widely used so it will always stick but prototypes give the impression that you can’t make a finished game even if you’re that skilled.

Even completed games need to be beta tested so it’s not like there’s a “complete” game ever. There is only a game where you decided you’ve done and added enough to it that you will stop working on it.

It’s not like movies where there’s a limited time as to what you can put in. Games can be long or they can be short. Prototypes can be just about the director telling the actor to redo a scene because it doesn’t look right and storyboards can have a stage where conceptualizing and visualizing is different from directing the movie.

Well at least you finally read the post. I’m just wondering where the point is other than trying to come back with an attack.

You picked apart my post, wrongly quoting snipped parts here and there to package them into pushing the topic into what you want which is essentially gameplay vs. story. But all you did is showed the trees when the topic is about the forest.

Worse, you also repeated a misconception and nitpick by Drakim. At this point, I’m just going to ignore you. Maybe you’re not a troll but when someone brings up ““The OP” apparently didn’t read his own posts in the thread,” it’s most likely a lost cause.

EndlessSporadic and Sellyme have little problem with understanding my posts. (Especially Sellyme which is a great example of a poster who ends up understanding something because they are not just trying to throw veiled attacks).

Maybe if you yourself back down on this idea that you (the person) and not your points are the one being called irrelevant, it would be easier to rephrase things that will make the subject clearer to you. As it stands the context of your latest reply can be basically summed up into “don’t criticize me, I know how to wrongly misquote you and take apart parts of your post to fit what I want them to be.”

Just interjecting to debunk the myth that rpgs are built with strong storylines because that’s part of the game’s genre.

Historically the plot behind most rpgs are as complicated as Mario or Pac-man. The packaging and the gameplay is what’s different. It’s the medium most people preferred to put stories earlier in, but it’s not a genre where strong storyline is required.

It’s much harder to one up a game where you basically grind to level up because back then stuff like Diablo were not only considered pushing the graphical capability of consoles but also because scripts are an easier way to sell more copies in a time when most game design were primitive and the best graphical games would only be considered alluring within the genre and in no way does even the best looking games become so great that they look like movies or real life character models.

Essentially what it boils down to is that RPGs are a primitive but much better packaged form of simulations and strategy games. The illusion of many rpgs having strong storyline is based on and due to designers trying to find ways to establish the roles to be more appealing to boost sales and there being very little innovative rpgs that sell well. Hence the story behind the first Final Fantasy. The epic storylines are an excuse to explain why random monsters pop up. Disgaea and FFT weren’t outliers. They were the norm that didn’t seem like they were because many were exposed to rpgs from FF7.

In fact FFT is based off on Tactics Ogre and Tactics Ogre is based off on Ogre Battle. A game much more closer to a sim/rts than an rpg. There is no special expectation in design or special property in the genre that says RPGs are inherently better at delivering stories. For every Final Fantasies with praised stories, there are a million and one rpgs that have mediocre storylines. Similarly the FF series does not have a strong story. What they have is a reputation for creating that illusion.

Disgaea is similar. People praise Disgaea 1’s story because more people like it. It has very little to do with expectations of length or “more” story. Very little people praised Rhapsody or Disgaea 2 compared to Disgaea. Yet they have arguably more of a storyline to them. Not talking about better since that’s subjective but simply more. Similarly Kartia was a game entirely built around a long story with absolutely no pandering to the rest of what makes rpgs in that the gameplay and the bonus modes were mostly ignored. Is it as well known as the FF series even though Yoshitaka Amano drew it and story was it’s strongest point? No.

What is consistently part of the rpg genre has always been appealing designs even going so far as high end graphics and addictive gameplay based on grinding. Few of the well praised rpgs with their stories would catch much attention if it weren’t for their graphics. Even FFT which many claimed was overlooked because of FF7 being a cinematic masterpiece for it’s time got attention because it was Tactics Ogre that not only looked prettier to the majority but the plot is based around mostly wonderful junk food plot stuff. Things such as a more memorable vague ending. Things such as there being an anti-hero that is less rugged and more bishounen in anime terms compared to the anti-hero in TO which is more of a villain. Essentially videogames like mainstream movies don’t always have strong storylines. What they have done is make the scripts be filled with pretty beautiful people. Safe stories that would sometimes shock based on 1 sudden scene that came out of nowhere. Almost everything that makes a successful rpg be so successful and considered having a great plot falls within the context that the rpg has lots of side quests, pretty armor, pretty big busted ladies, cutscenes – all stuff that make mainstream movies seem more depthful than they really are. Of course there are outliers with truly great plots and many of the plots are subject to tastes however as far as the overall genre is all about, it has never needed it’s legs to be about strong storylines and plots.

Just so a wall of text won’t be necessary, let’s just leave it at: this topic doesn’t have anything to do with story vs. gameplay. It doesn’t mean you can ignore it for game design. It’s just not what the topic is about.

It has nothing to do with why players skip introductions.

It has nothing to do about whether a game puts or doesn’t put anything in the game and the examples I listed do have introductions. It’s not a case of whether they should remove them or add something else.

Your comment about endings and why developers leave out certain things is the only thing relatively close to the subject and even there you’re not talking about game design. You’re describing why some developers decide to be horrible game designers. The topic at most is talking about inconsistent game designers.

Finally…

The context of story vs gameplay can’t be ignored, because that’s what you get in casual gaming…. in a small indie team of maybe one programmer and one artist, there isn’t a whole studio just making CGI cutscenes and writing epic, powerful plotlines. they can work more on the story, or they can work more on the gameplay. Players prefer the gameplay.

The context of the examples are not about developers omitting cutscenes but making obvious efforts to adding them only to seemingly drop the ball after putting all that effort.

Seriously though, dude, get over yourself. Your post is irrelevant because you are living and posting in your own world. It’s not criticism. It’s the OP pointing out that your replies are irrelevant to the subject of the thread HE MADE because as you said, you didn’t read anything but the title and you’re bad at second guessing what the title is about.

Exactly. It says great intro. Introductions don’t interrupt the story. The beginning parts of a game or even the middle if the game is an introductory style of gaming and even the end if the ending is what’s off don’t interrupt the player.

You have to put the conversation into a subject of story vs. gameplay before your post becomes relevant.

Not only that, most casual players are used if not love levels where you can take a break and get a sense of achievement by moving to the next stage. Almost no game is continuous with no pause.

You’re lumping story based breaks where you have to read the text or hear the audio with that of a premise that assumes most casual gamers just want to get it on even though the topic is not about that.

Another way to look at it (although this is of course not based on intelligent math) is to make the ai want to to survive as opposed to having a desire to dominate the living player.

This means the numbers don’t have to take into account the entire map but just take into account the threat of the opposing threat with most of the offense being about a flip coin question between whether it is more likely for the threat to destroy the ai because the ai left a piece alone or the ai would be more threatened by the player due to allowing the player to spread their castles.

I don’t know if doing it this way would be more complicated but basically it just means instead of measuring the map, you calculate the castles the opposing player has and where they are placed.

…except in this case, the designers do care about the story. Whether they care enough to make it great to you or me is up for debate but as far as effort goes, they care enough to go the extra mile.

Look, I made the same statement you are saying in the general gaming forums. It’s one thing to skip everything but the thread title because you grasped the core content of a topic, it’s another to skip to the thread title only to end up posting an irrelevant reply. Even the title said great “intro” not great graphics or gameplay.

as more expansions are put out, the process to reach end game gets longer and longer, there needs a way to speed up the fresh blood through the system, all MMO have a features like that in terms of gifts and extra rewards for daily log on while this game gives newbies nothing.

This games gives gold and WBs, which can be used to buy refills. Why are we trying to rush newbs through the missions anyhow? Does it matter really either way?

To reiterate what others have said, it’s not that there’s no mechanism already in place. It’s that the game can still be sped up.

However I think the premise is flawed. The game’s endgame is still based around a competitive faction war into which no newb can legitimately participate in and be rewarded with a richer experience.

The endgame experience literally amounts to training you to be used to a storyline single player experience only to make you participate in an unrelated multiplayer experience that requires more activity than the single player experience.

It’s not really like other MMOs where sometimes you can just make a faction for fun and there are group activities that can be done without the entire groups needing to be active. Once you get to a certain point, either everyone has to be active at the same time, or you need a tolerant faction leader.

Basically the missions may be newb repelling but the faction wars by design are even more. If you don’t replace the end game, there’s nothing saying a newb will be much more likely to stay just because they get to faction wars and raids much faster. Faction wars and raids aren’t rewards they’re a different option to play the game. Speeding the grind up is just a way for a newb to be finally competitive enough to join multiplayer and interact with players but there’s no additional experience other than playing a different type of deck. There’s no live pvp. There’s no group chat wars. There’s no way for a non-paying customer to strategically catch up with someone who warbonds. There’s no group tactic that doesn’t involve mostly outpointing a faction by everyone being there almost every time you begin an attack.

You can’t just jump in if you don’t have the stamina. You can’t just jump out because then you’d be using your stamina inefficiently. It’s not a subscription based game where you buy stacks of stamina refills that get activated when you log in and that those refills means you can play longer as long as you don’t want to stop. It is based around the entire assumption that newbs would feel rewarded for joining competitive factions sooner and that alone would make them stay even though factions and raids are more tedious and more based around dead farming where as the missions are all about seeing the next story dialogue and then maybe farming for cards.

There you go. Essentially you just admitted that you were trying to fit a top 40 faction and considering it basic faction war talk.

You never said rush deck = pummpool but you might as well say it because you were opening up an analogy that asks what rush decks are. I comprehend your words that’s why I pretty much showed you point blank where you are making a failed analogy:

You went from trolling a failed image reply, got called out.

…so you compensated by throwing out an elitist definition, again got countered by a wiki link and had to fall back on the idea that wiki can be edited by anyone because otherwise you have to address that link

…tried to save face and went full retard and instead of making it clearer, opted for an analogy that was wrong and blurred the point of your original post.

…which is the definition of going full retard where instead of doing a 180 to cement your point, you did a 360 and made your point worse off.

I was just being polite so I made the above list instead of imitating what you did by just vomiting an unhelpful initial image post reply but if you are just going to be all bimbo for every time something gets clarified to you and go “I N3V@R said Rush Deck = Pummpool so there!” well then let us not talk to each other again. I only really even replied to you for the benefit of those people just like you that didn’t quite understand the post.

Brilliant act of ignore.

Brilliant act of reading:

Again context. Out of here = at first I just wanted to ignore Siberian. Then they said something that made me want to add how maybe Siberian and I should never talk again.

I think the criticism for sandbox is overrated. For a flash example, Caravaneer already proved that wrong.

There’s a lot of tediousness and quick deaths with that game but when it finally came to the story, the missions didn’t need to feel broken.

GTA 3 was just a poorly presented and executed game that finally caught people’s attention because the addictive concept was finally mixed with graphics unseen of at that time in terms of scope and then you pretty much have the copycats playing around and mimicking that flawed concept.

Earlier sandbox games never had any problem with delivering story. Going back to things like Sid Meier’s Pirates or Sword of the Samurai, sandbox games are great for delivering stories because they are actually part of the over-arching world where the story doesn’t take priority over the characters and ends up turning the MCs into pretty boy/boobalicious girl Mary Sues/Gary Stus.

As far as info dumps. I think this too is overhated but often for the right reasons.

When people get mad at info dumps, it’s often because they have played games with poor small fonts, unnecessary info dumps, interface that already bombard them with unnecessary texts and yet with all those texts the game still comes off vague.

This becomes etched in their mentality so much that sometimes more so than not, no one notices games with massive info dumps that don’t have these problems. Union City is one modern example of just using notepads but for a more specific example, look at Rebuild. Tons of random event info dumps that ends up having tons of players enjoying it. In contrast look at Eredan. Show don’t tell at it’s finest and one poster even claimed it was good but the bottomline was that you still had enough people complaining how it was long and wrong for the gamer to not be allowed to skip it.

It’s presentation when it comes down to it. If you present an info dump as lore. It’s tedious. If you present it as a mystery or a conspiracy or a what if. It adds to the world and it allows for slightly shorter info dumps that are still info dumps but ones that deliver the package.

Sometimes it’s necessary because it gets to a point where people focus on one thing like Drakim but act like they aren’t/feel they aren’t. Often times it’s just worth it just to at least have one person say good point regardless if you disagree or agree with my point.

Often times it’s just because I am the OP. Obviously I have to back up and make clear what I am writing. It’s my thread and I am seeking some explanation. If something is vague it’s not like there won’t be a future mixture of troublemakers/nitpickers/trolls/trolls pretending to not be trolls/people whom I legitimately failed to communicate to that would further go away from the central point. Text walls cut to the chase of who are legitimately out there interested in the content of the topic. As long as I’m elaborating and not repeating for the sake of some pretend manner of snarkiness I don’t mind writing in a way that better clarifies my point. Most decent repliers get to a point where because they don’t try to run with a small point the text trickle down to short sentences that are the bare essentials and nothing else anyway.

@Drakim,

No I don’t misunderstand anything. At least not that you have shown. Besides audio, you can have mini-elements adding up to something bigger. For example Union City doesn’t have character dialogue but that building you enter into with that one notepad that you have to click at in order to present the text, that still contributes to the whole package once enough of it is littered about. I keep talking about game design to which the presentation of text can also be included under – be it due to audio, additional graphics, additional animation, etc.

When it comes to the professional industry, the instant drop in quality comes from either a lack of money or a lack of time before the project deadline.

Good point but honestly it seems like a cop out. I don’t mean this as an attack. I mean deadlines make sense but in low budget games I would assume deadline is more about features and content that is core to the actual game. Not high level examples of game design that went to the point of making unnecessary trinkets more pain staking to create than it’s normally done only for those same execution to seemingly disappear in something that can be better and more easily payed attention to.

You could also use anime to represent that. The industry almost never cops out in quality for higher budget shows unless the production team was just plain horrible.

Obviously the analogy fails to be exact since the cut off is with regards to flash games and not about an entire genre but it still holds true that if deadlines or lack of money were the reason for the drop in quality:

1) Apokalyx shouldn’t have made one overtly long intro that was then expanded into introes for three classes. This type of cutscene storytelling was not only ambitious but even high budget games rarely do it this way. Yet from a game design standpoint, it seemed like they have enough time to make unnecessary cutscenes and an unnecessary story based tutorial dialogue and unnecessary random dialogues intermixed between long points of nothing but random enemies that don’t add to the experience except make the game take longer to get to a story related event.

2) Union City is the reverse. If the ending seems rushed why in the world would the developer even assume people would buy the premium version of the flash game? Almost every element of Union City seemed like a much higher quality than what gamers are used to flash games and the developer is no stranger to making a passable ending. Even if the designer could not think of a good way to end the game the difference between creating the same ending without an animated sunset with a mini-boat would have been far easier, quicker and better than the way the current ending was designed as. The game at that point showed little reason of the designer being ignorant of presenting great content within a limited budget. Zombies falling down to depict hordes. Buildings that can be entered and full of worthwhile content in context of locations that are actually just small buildings. Effects added to the bare minimum but ones that vastly increase the tension of the game. A mostly dead end world that seems alive because the developer has a great idea of where to put in the characters. The ending was the only place that lacked that sort of execution and added not just substracted something that seems unnecessary. Not in terms of subjective quality but speaking strictly of game design.

3) Magi is also another similar but different example. The change could have been saved for making a slight shift from fetch quest to fetch quest that adds to the story presented in the intro. Design wise, you would think it was much harder finding different vague names for the weapons and items than to just add simple texts that add to the intro full of quotes and talks about a world having gone through a disaster.

I am not saying developers have to be perfect creatures and maybe you are right that this is all there is to it but it just seems like an inherently flawed gaming design rationale and it is something I have only seen in Flash games. Sometimes it becomes more so because we’re used to flash games having a limited set of presentation but when graphical flash games set the bar high, the flawed design becomes even more apparent. At least with the flash games with poorer graphics/presentation, such flaws can be excused as part of the limited resources the designer was working with.

Overrunned, your way of talking makes it almost impossible for me to understand the point you are trying to make, but I can assure you that storyline text does not (noticeably) increase loading time in any way, shape or form. Not even if you do that thing where you use your right hand to cover your left eye and then squint with your right eye.

Sometimes there are games that are better played first as there’s no explaining it but by playing through them, sometimes it doesn’t even need to be elaborated. For example, the text issue. If you have played those games and seen the contrast they deliver from the rest of the flash games out there, it wouldn’t be complicated. Even the theme is pretty much spelled out in the title and in my subsequent reply. I’m not saying text alone adds to the loading.

You’re complaining (fairly) about bad story-lines in good games, so I fail to see how Apokalyx is relevant.

If I was complaining about it then it wouldn’t belong in a forum about game design.

That pretty much also omits any subjective element like bad storylines and good games as that could depend on how the receiver considers it, not on it’s design.

Apokalyx is relevant because here you have a clear example where the developer obviously went to the effort to deliver a better looking introduction, ending and hell the tutorial is itself longer than the main plot dialogues while using mostly the same engine and way of speaking.

The underlying question is not the quality but the effort and the intent. If you add quality to it, it’s not a question of game design anymore. It’s a question of why certain developers do things in such a way that displeases you or me or whoever your next neighbor is. Those issues have nothing to do with game design.

The same holds true for Union City. The problem is not the quality or the type of ending. The problem is the difference in effort and execution between what the game offered and then how the ending is executed. It has nothing to do with how you or me received/enjoyed/hated the quality afterwards. It’s about “game design choices” and why certain developers seem to have chosen those particular inferior designs in certain sections when they put so much effort into executing a superior design for the most part of their games.

For example:

If this was about good storytelling, then we can go back and forth about Apokalyx. I could say there has never been a flash storyline based around a Post-Apocalyptic Gladiator fight. You could say, “So what? Doesn’t mean the storyline isn’t stupid.”

I’m not saying that’s my stance or this is going to be your reply. Just that this subjectivity clearly doesn’t touch the topic of game design at all. It falls into a subject of tastes.

Only by treating the design in the games as design choices can we talk about design. In this case in Apokalyx the cinematic especially for the 3 races at the beginning does not back up how most of the storyline is one line of extended dialogue where the MC meets his would be assailant in the tournament. It doesn’t explain why someone would go through so much effort to tell you in cutscene form with voices how after the MC defeats one character he is heading to a new town only for the concluding plot of the dialogues to be “Well, you’re finally here but you won’t get through me.”

That would apply to games that aren’t like Apokalyx, Magi or Union City.

We’re not talking about any general flash game. We’re talking about flash games where across the board the designer seemed to have address everything but dropped the ball on a text for some reason.

Prior to the ending, Union City had a gripping storyline but the ending felt like it was a rip off of those arcade game beat em up type of endings minus the text and the extra close up.

Apokalyx had voice overs and a storyline. It was just missing most of the middle body of a storyline where instead of adding to the story, the cinematics just felt like telling you the player is going to the next stage.

Magi also had an epic introduction and the game didn’t need to have a complex story. Just an ending + a story based main quest.

Even Papa’s games have a storyline based on showing the MC gaining a new place as a prize.

Most of these games take a while to load already. A game like Apokalyx even go so far as to have randomized voiced dialogue. The addition of the text itself is not the issue. It’s the design behind how each of those text would work.

I brought that up however because there just seems to be no clear logic as to why a developer would go so far as to work on everything from music to introductions to graphics to some semblance of a storyline and then just bail out and make the game inferior in one of the aspects that’s easiest to add. Almost as if adding extra storyline text might increase the loading for those games.

The statement is there however to beg the question as to why some flash designers design certain things in such a way that makes it seem as if it’s that way, not as a stand alone question to usher in a claim that adding extra storyline text does in fact increase loading time.

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